Saturday, May 28, 2016

Trump makes media cry, "Curses! Foiled again."

In the cartoons, Snidely Whiplash would kidnap Nell Fenwick and tie her to the railroad tracks. But Dudley Do-Right of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would rescue her and apprehend him, at which point, Whiplash would say, "Curses! Foiled again."

For the past year, pundits have repeatedly said, "Curses! Foiled again."
Some would say that Donald Trump is destroying the press on his way to the White House and they could be correct, but perhaps the press had already destroyed itself and Trump was the first politician to stand up to it, which made it fall. After all, most Americans no longer trust the media.

It's like the question: Did grandma fall and break her hip, or did she break her hip and fall? The difference is we care about grandma.

The power of the press eroded over the years because the press abused that power, just as the power of Nixon as president eroded because he abused that power. Trust is difficult to gain, easy to lose.

Interviews of course are abused both by the conductor and the subject. Careful editing of remarks can make a subject look like a fool. However, subjects are now taping their interviews as protection, which Katie Couric recently discovered much to her horror. However, subjects can set restrictions and other conditions on their interviews. This is fine when an entertainer wants to promote her new project, or an author his new book. But when tough questions are off limits, the interview is a sham and a charade.

Indeed, according to Shafer, interviews have a dubious history:

The interview also changed the nature of presidential politics. At one time, getting a president’s views on the record meant quoting one of his speeches. Presidents would talk to reporters about the issues, but generally forbid them to quote the conversations because interviews seemed too familiar and undignified. That changed in 1867 when President Andrew Johnson, on the verge of being impeached, summoned correspondent Joseph B. McCullagh to the White House to hear and broadcast his side of the story. “The damn newspapers are as bad as the politicians in misrepresenting me,” Johnson told McCullagh, asking only to be quoted accurately. What Johnson instigated soon spread across the land, on to Europe, and eventually conquered all of journalism.

And in the next paragraph, Shafer admitted interviews are about promoting the power of the press, not necessarily the truth:

The interview became indispensable to journalism not because it works as a truth detector, but because it established useful ground rules for news reporting. As an act of “impersonal surveillance”—Schudson’s term—the interview put news subjects (politicians, potentates, captains of industry) on notice that their words and action were being noted and recorded for posterity. This surveillance, in turn, creating a sort of “impersonal social control”—Schudson’s coinage, again—that kept some sort of semblance of order in the house of truth. Yes, news subjects could still use the interview form to lie, but at the price of being found out and humbled and shamed. Even Richard Nixon, as wily a liar ever to submit to an interview, could not escape its censuring power, as David Frost wore him down in a set of 1977 interviews and got him to apologize for his transgressions.

This is not to disparage all interviews or malign journalists. I would say 95% are on the up-and-up, although there is a bit of a social justice warrior streak in the reporting staff.

But the bottom line is the bottom line of the column:

By rejecting the authority of the press to judge him, Trump has debilitated if not destroyed the power of the interview, befuddling a press corps that still believes it can bring him down with one more gotcha, one more “Pinocchio", one more “Pants On Fire" from the fact-checkers. Trump is laughing at them now.

Did Trump make the media fall and break its credibility, or did the media break its credibility and fall? We know the answer.

Available on Kindle on July 1 -- "Trump the Press: Don Surber's take on how the pundits blew the 2016 Republican race."

13 comments:

In Vietnam, the press was mostly harpies who showed up after the blood letting and asked questions like, "How do you feel about your friend being killed?" There were some how slept on the ground and crapped in a cathole, but they were few and far between.

Exactly. I remember an interview Dan Blather did with the Clintons where he all but worshiped them. I'm glad to see the press AKA the propaganda arm of the Dimocrat Party getting its comeuppance and they brought it upon themselves. We need a fair an impartial press in this country. Too bad we haven't had one during my lifetime.

I just think it's laughable that the few "DC" friends I have left - I.e. Liberals - are so nervous right now and see nothing wrong with the rioters at Trump's events. These people have lost their minds. We cannot turn the other cheek any longer, sad to say. It's going to be a very violent summer but I ain't planning on standing down. This is MY country and I'm full well able to fight for it.

One the one hand, Pres. Lincoln never gave a press conference or an interview to a journalist. On the other hand, anybody who wanted to talk to him could go to the White House, have a seat and wait, and eventually have a few words with him.

The press has credibility? They haven't any since "Uncle Walter" lied about the Vietnamese war. And I was in my teens then. And ever since its been one lie after another, only believed by those who live in the liberal bubble. And thanks to the Global Warming Weather Channel, they don't have much either. If you can't accurately predict what will happen in the next month, why on earth should we believe you when you fast forward to fifty years from now?